Schools Gone Wildly Green

It’s almost back-to-school time, and this year it seems like quite a few colleges across the country are making some major changes as the next fresh batch of students arrives.

Students arriving on campus this month are seeing green — and not just from the money they’re spending on tuition.

For example, students coming to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., will start their school year with the university’s first “Green Move-In.” Rose Dunnegan, the university’s property manager, says the program follows the success of last semester’s “Green Move-Out.” Student and staff volunteers recycled thousands of pounds of clothing, household items, food and “e-cycling” materials, including cellphones, batteries and computer parts, Dunnegan says.

Checkpoints for the Green Move-In include organic reusable shopping bags at the school bookstore, designated recycling areas for packing boxes, and a paperless check-in system. George Washington University is by no means the only school going green, either. Among other schools following suit is our very own UC San Diego (rah-rah-rah, go Tritons!), taking it to the next level by going beyond actions and changing their very structure. Or, structures anyway.

Freshmen at the University of California-San Diego’s Sixth College will move into renovated dorms that are equipped with solar thermal heating, and new carpet and furniture made from recycled material, says Mark Cunningham, the school’s executive director of housing, dining and hospitality. The student residences also will have low-flow shower heads and energy-efficient lighting.

The university will give each on-campus apartment a bucket of eco-friendly cleaning supplies. If that project is successful, Cunningham says, the university will consider giving a year’s supply of the products to all apartments.

I would just like to mention that when I did my time in the dorms, it looked like they hadn’t seen renovation since roughly the Vietnam War. Not that I’m jealous or anything. Cunningham states, importantly, that the lessons taught by providing students with a sustainable atmosphere are not meant to end upon graduation — rather, the hope is to develop and foster habits that will lead to a lifetime of eco-consciousness and sustainability. Let’s hope!

Photo via Flickr! By the way, almost every single picture that came up in a search for keywords “college life” and wasn’t a shot of a random building showed college kids gone wild in (or preparing for) a drunken stupor or its aftermath. Take a break, kids! Be productive! Go green!

Thursday, August 14th, 2008 at 9:56 am and is filed under The Daily. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.